SAMPLE WORD | SAMPLE PDF

If you look across the chapters in this collection, you’ll notice that every leader describes how they have applied what they have learned in their specific institutional context. “Institutional context” refers to (a) the mission and values of the college or university (and, if you are interested in a unit within the university, of that unit); (b) the ways mission(s) and value(s) are enacted through language; and (c) an understanding of who is more and less invested in the mission and values and why. Getting a sense of these three components of institutional context provides a way to understand how the system of the institution is constructed: what it is; how it is maintained, by whom, and why; and who is invested in maintaining and not maintaining it and why.

While a leadership statement doesn’t need to define a specific institutional context, it is useful to include (explicitly or implicitly) the idea that you know how to learn about institutions; to adapt what you know to different institutional contexts; and how to learn what more you need to know. These abilities, in fact, are characteristics of expert learners, i.e., expert learners understand how to make knowledge within specific contexts; how to adapt what they know from other contexts; and how to learn what they don’t know (Bransford 2000).

A leadership statement might refer to your learning strategies— it’s unlikely to refer to your specific context. But to practice developing these strategies, we recommend conducting a brief analysis of your current context, then annotating how you have conducted this analysis. We emphasize annotation here because this how is what you’ll emphasize in a leadership statement. It’s a description of how you know how to learn about institutional context.

The following table outlines some possible artifacts to analyze (column one) and analytical strategies (column two) for this engagement. In column three, list questions you might ask to situate what you’re noticing in context. Finally, in column four, record what you have noticed in your analysis and how you noticed what you did. Again, we provide a brief example in the first row. The ideas in column four—what you might attend to as you learn about an institution— are what you might include in a leadership statement in order to describe how you go about learning about institutions.

Table 2.1. Analyzing Institutional Context [PDF] [Microsoft Word]

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References

Bransford, John D., Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cockings, eds. 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine / The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.7226/9853.

Cite this Resource

Adler-Kassner, Linda, and Chris W. Gallagher, eds. 2026. “Engagement 2: Institutional Context.” Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn: Playbook. Center for Engaged Learning. https://doi.org/10.36284/celelon.oa11.